Today is definitely a day to celebrate some progress with my own wellbeing. I won’t go into too much detail but I was able to control my impulsivity and not share information that is best kept to myself. I’m pretty proud of myself. This is not where I would have been just 3 years ago.

Anyway, I spent most of my day working 1-on-1 with students rather than teaching directly. In economics we spent a bit of time trying to understand the supply curve. Hint, I still don’t truly understand it. Then I spent quite a bit of time walking through one and two step equations with students in math. One thing that I think was helpful with that class is that I had the students verbalize the problem aloud. This is important because the students need to be able to identify operations and functions of those operations before they can move on to inverse operations. These students are still struggling but I can see some growth in their ability to work independently on equations and inequalities. I’m feeling really good about the progress these students are making.

At the end of the day, I ran into a couple students of mine from economics class. They are struggling to understand the topics at hand. I showed them each the YouTube video I found that helped explain the concept to me. To my amusement, one of the students said that he couldn’t understand the video because of the language the narrator was using. He asked if he could just memorize the definitions. It’s only when we cannot understand someone that we find language to be an important part of school. In so many ways, what he is asking is summing up the feelings of all students, not just the students learning English. Language is what allows us to communicate our ideas. The more in depth a topic goes, the more likely it is to have it’s own vocabulary to communicate specific concepts. If there was a walking argument for teaching all teachers why language matters in all subjects, he is it.